PIA08411: Saturn’s Long-lived Storm

It is no Great Red Spot, but these two side-by-side views show the
longest-lived electrical storm yet observed on Saturn by NASA’s Cassini
spacecraft.

The views were acquired more than three months after the storm was first
detected from its lightning-produced radio discharges on Nov. 27, 2007.
See PIA08410 for an earlier color view of this storm. Cassini imaging
scientists believe the storm to be a vertically extended disturbance that
penetrates from Saturn’s lower to upper troposphere.

The view at left was created by combining images taken using red, green
and blue spectral filters, and shows Saturn in colors that approximate
what the human eye would see. The storm stands out with greater clarity in
the sharpened, enhanced color view at right. This view combines images
taken in infrared, green and violet light at 939, 567 and 420 nanometers
respectively and represents an expansion of the wavelength region of the
electromagnetic spectrum visible to human eyes. This view looks toward the
un-illuminated side of the rings from about 3 degrees above the ringplane.
Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) appears as a dark speck just
beneath the rings in both images.

These images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera
on March 4, 2008, at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers
(800,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 74 kilometers (46 miles) per
pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. The radio and plasma wave science team
is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.